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FridayBob writes "For those of you tired of waiting around for someone else to achieve the holy grail of physics, now's your chance to beat 'em all to it. All you need is some basic engineering skills, this site and the inspiration necessary to make your very own 'fusor' produce more energy than it consumes. Hopefully, you'll have more luck than its inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, who first built it in the 1950's after inventing the television some 30 years earlier. If you run into problems you'll be able to count on a enthusiastic support group, as the contraption seems to have developed a cult following over the past few years. Okay, so I'm skeptical that this approach will ever really work, but at the very least it sounds like a really cool science project!"

Fusion is not dirty. Whereas fission starts with big, heavy atoms and breaks then apart, fusion starts with tiny atoms-- just particles, really-- and smooshes them together. Fission starts with uranium or something heavier, while fusion starts with merely protons created from hydrogen atoms electrolyzed from pure water.

but coal ash is. Currently, aside from the proton/boron-11 reaction (which yields 3 alpha particles) and deuterium-He3, I'm unaware of any fusion reaction which does not yield high-energy neutrons. The neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion come out at 14.1 MeV, I don't recall the value for D-D fusion (which yields helium-3 and a neutron). High-energy neutrons create radioactive stuff by transmuting other nuclei.

The current state of fusion energy is pretty bad (way below a self-sustaining reaction) but this could still be used as a neutron source to drive a sub-critical fusion-fission reactor. Anyone who opposes fission power because of the spent-fuel issue wouldn't find this to be an improvement. (I would, because high-energy neutrons would be useful for transmuting fission products themselves, extracting their remnant energy and transforming them into stable isotopes. But I'm a geek and a technophile.)

You really aren't supporting your argument that fusion is cleaner than fission, but I will.

Fission is dirty: you get neutrons and gammas irradiating things while in operation, activated reactor plant components when shut down and spent fuel that is highly radioactive to dispose of when done. Of course its highly radioactive because the fission products are decaying (hence heating it up). Don't let it get too hot even when shut down or bad things can happen (aka Three Mile Island).

Fusion is dirty: you get neutrons and gammas irradiating things while in operation and activated reactor plant components. From what I hear the reactants and products are not radioactive.

Okay, I'm a little rusty on the exact fine details about this, but there are nonetheless a few things that need to be cleaned up. (pun intended)

1. Fission is dirty. We're all familiar with this one. You get radioactive products and energy. Open and shut case.

2. Fusion can be done. We could do it all the time, and I'm talking about break-even fusion with power production. Why don't we? Because this kind of fusion is dirty. When you use Tritium as a reactant, you get radioactive products kicking around after everything is said and done.

3. Deuterium/Deuterium fusion is not "dirty". Deuterium is a non-radioactive isotope. This, however, is the kind of break-even fusion we're having a bit of trouble with. The problem here is that the energy required to get the Deuterium/Deuterium reaction going is a lot more than the comparatively simple Deuterium/Tritium one.

This is, from what I recall, more or less the problem in a nutshell. If anyone with a degree in physics who specializes in plasma physics or such would like to go into more detail, I'd be greatful.

I have a pocket full of chemical reactors which can reach a temperature of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit within a half-second of initiation, and can be used to start many highly destructive reactions.

Not at all similar. I looked into getting a grant to make one of these for a Science Museum. They are perfectly legal, pretty safe (as safe as many other common devices) and fairly easy to make - i.e., they have been built by many people and the necessary skills are common to many other activities.

It was either that or a liquid fuel rocket engine, and I decided that that was more dangerous, expensive and time consuming. I just moved across the country, so all my major projects got a year or two hold as I locate like minded geeks out here.

The second law is about entropy. Do you know what entropy *is*? Entropy is the law that requires heat engines to consume fuel despite conservation of energy -- and the single most misunderstood law of physics. Parent poster was right.

Zworykin or however its spelled stole his ideas from Farnsworth. Baird invented a mechanical TV system, which had very limited potential.
Farnsworth invented electronic TV. He is the inventor of what everyone knows as TV, specifically he came up with the idea of scanning lines on a CRT to produce the image. The only practical way to have TV.

But the most compelling promise of fusion is in the fuel itself: fusion is produced from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, which exists in the Earth's oceans in sufficient abundance to supply the planet's energy needs for hundreds of millions of years - until long after the Sun itself has flamed out.
The sun is supposed to burn out in 5 billion years, I believe.

fusion is produced from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, which exists in the Earth's oceans in sufficient abundance to supply the planet's energy needs for hundreds of millions of years - until long after the Sun itself has flamed out.

Fat chance of that. When the sun has burned itself out, Earth will be a dry, uninhabitable cinder.

Before everyone gets started on their arguments about who invented television (thanks submitter!), please read through the comments on this [slashdot.org] article. Unless you have newly unearthed evidence, please leave it alone as it has been discussed to death. Ok? Thanks.

www.bovik.org/codeposition/best.gif [bovik.org] (confirmatory experiment you can do at home for less than the cost of building a Farnsworth fusor.)

Umm, sure you can do that at home for cheap, as long as you have a convenient source of heavy water, a highly regulated substance that's a key ingredient in certain plutonium breeder reactors. Of course, it does occur naturally, you could filter it out of normal water at a ratio of about 1 molecule in 20,250,000 [1] if you had enough time. Or you could just make it yourself through enrichment, provided you can find a source of deuterium (good frigging luck) and had at least a few grand to throw at the equipment. There's more in depth information at the FAS site [fas.org] if you don't believe me.

I'd love it if I was wrong and you had a convenient source of heavy water, but I somehow doubt it.

1: I got the 20,250,000 number because deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen which occurs naturally at a rate of about 1:4500 hydrogen atoms, but to make heavy water (D2O) out of regular water (H2O) you have to have both hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium, making the natural heavy water ratio 1 in 4500^2, or 1:20,250,000.

Strange, we up here in Canada have nuclear reactors, and haven't been named as members of the 'axis of evil'. I can't speak definitively for Europe, but I heard a rumor that many of the countries over there are in a similar position.

Defective HV regulator tubes on some old color TVs turned some of them into rather nasty X-ray generators; you didn't have to do anything.

Imagine all the little kiddies with their noses practically against the screen, getting dosed with ionizing radiation all the while. Or sitting in front of it, knees up, gonads up close and unshielded. One wonders if there would be identifiable effects from this... no time to check.

Did you ever see the Simpsons where Homer and Grandpa went back to the old family farm, and homers shadow was burned into the wall from their Radiation King tv set. I also remember in 6th grade all the monitors in the computer lab had stickers on them, "Now With Low Radiation!", or something like that.

According to IMDb Trivia for Futurama [imdb.com], the "Farnsworth"-character is actually named after Philo T. Farnsworth:

Professor Farnsworth is named after the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the pioneers of television, whose invention was premiered at the 1939 New York World's Fair, along with the Futurama exhibit.

What a load of crap. Good luck. These reactors require more energy to run than they produce. And D2 (deuterium gas) isn't cheap either. As for the oceans having enough deuterium to let us outlast the sun... cods whallop. There's obviously a mis count there, or the numbers are fudged. Maybe if you produced such a small amout of energy that one could make it last longer that's possible, but the Sun contains more matter than the rest of the solar system combined. The Earth's oceans arent' even a drop in the bucket (pardon the experssion).The energy gain, or lack there-of, is why there are no commercial fusion reactors, energy output doesn't off-set cost and energy input. -- It's not like fusion hasn't been achieved! It has. You may even want to check out the muon catalyzed fusion reactions that were being done right up until a year or so ago at TRIUMF in BC Canada, same problems there too... and that was the most promising in a long time.

The "As for the oceans having enough deuterium to let us outlast the sun" part...

It says there is enough deuterium to provide humanity with power for hundreds of millions of years. Obviously the sun pumps out a LOT more power than humanity uses in a given year...

They aren't claiming anything to the effect of the ocean being more powerful than the sun... they're saying that there is enough D2 on earth to provide humanity with power until the sun dies and our energy problems cease to matter.

Now we don't have to develop a static powered car [tilleyfoundation.com], but can rather make a Mr Fusion [nitpickers.com] to power the Flux Capacitor [showtech.com] so we can go to the future where all of life's problems are already solved!

Link: [infi.net] Naturally, knowledge regarding the safety aspects of such an effort is essential! Among the more common concerns are the workwith the explosive hydrogen gas, deuterium. High voltage hazards abound as over 20,000 volts is needed toaccelerate the deuterons. Radiation in the form of X-rays and neutrons must be dealt with as well.

You should read "Brotherhood of the Bomb" and read how Ernest Lawrence worked with his cyclotrons at Berkly (SP?). They basicly set up shop in a wooden shack. They had no sheilding or anything for a long time. Pretty much anything sounds safer and more advanced than his early creations.

If the stable one-atmosphere plasmoid [slashdot.org] didn't do it, and the DIY breeder reactor [slashdot.org] didn't succeed, there will no doubt be some ingenious/. readers who decide to create a high-energy neutron source out in their garage to remove themselves from the gene pool. CmdrTaco, Timothy, what is it with all the sterility how-to guides you're giving your readers?

This page [crppwww.epfl.ch] has a lot of links to different fusion sites around the world. These websites probably contain a lot more useful information than the slashdotted article.

By the way, my university [www.epfl.ch] happends to have a research center [crppwww.epfl.ch] on plasma physics. It's not as easy as "some basic engineering skills, this site and the inspiration necessary to make your very own 'fusor' produce more energy than it consumes" =)

To be honest, I had never really heard about IEC/electrostatic confinement fusion before. The spherical containment idea is very cool, at least in concept, if it could even be conceivable to make it get to breakeven (.01% of breakeven... that's pretty pathetic).

I read through some of the basic info on the page (before some of it got Slashdotted) and then started reading the forums. That's when I started finding the unfortunate schwag like this thread [fusor.net]. The problem with all of these sorts of projects is that they tend to attract nutters who think they've rewritten the laws of physics in their garage from scratch using "maths" that they just can't divulge yet because they don't quite work. Ugh. Free energy weirdos and neuvo-quantum threory weirdos - two of a kind.

Things like this always make me wonder, if an area is so promising, why aren't there any academics out there getting funding to pursue it? I mean, I realize sometimes the academic ESTABLISHMENT can be closeminded, but if something has merit, there are usually a FEW academics who will go out on a limb and pursue it to the point that they demonstrate sufficiently interesting results to build a broader base of interest. I've never honestly heard of massive numbers of academics whole-hog ignoring truly promising areas out of some misguided conspiracy bullshit, and frankly it's quite hard to imagine, since the drive for personal fame and glory usually trumps the desire to avoid stepping on toes and to "toe the line".

It sounds like there is real work yet to be done to get these things close to breakeven, and it probably ain't gonna get done in some garage project, but hey, you never know.

So I read through the patent and I've seen talks on electrostatic confinement fusion at plasma physics conferences (plasma physics is once again my day job).

I'm quite doubtful. My objection can be explained by looking at Figure 2 of the Hirsch and Meeks patent linked to through the fusor.net site.

You need accelerate the ions to high energy (or equivalently heat the ions to high temperatures) so that they will collide and fuse. If the energy is too low, electrostatic repulsion will prevent the nuclei from getting close enough to let the strong force do its work.

So what is my objection with Figure 2?

To confine a plasma with sufficient energy to have respectable amounts of fusion requires very high potentials (think many mega-volt DC potentials) to trap the ions if you are doing it electrostatically. If the potential barrier isn't high enough, the ions will escape the reactor without fusing---you dump all this energy into the ions and they just leave, taking your energy with them...

For an electrostatic confinement system, you would need confining potentials comparable to the height of the nuclear electrostatic repulsion barrier (for the ions to fuse, they need to have energies higher than the nuclear electrostatic repulsion barrier but below the reactor electrostatic confinement barrier).

Figure 2 is the potential distribution for the reactor. The potentials are a couple _thousand_ times too small to have any chance of confining fusion capable ions. At no point in the patent was it explained (clearly... legalese is not good science writing) why high energy ions would be trapped and fuse in such a modest potential well.

Kevin

P.S. Furthermore, a purely electrostatic confining potential is not allowed by Poisson's equation (the equation governing electrostatics), as is taught in any first year college physics class. The quick explanation is that Gauss's law implies the existance of a charge in the potential well. But if you are trying to make a trap to isolate a particle, that is exactly what you don't want in your well. For example, Penning traps use a combination of electrostatic confinement (confinement at the end-caps) and magnetic fields (radial confinement). However, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt as this appears to be relying on dynamic effects virtual cathode/anode effects. (Actually, much of the initial modeling of virtual cathodes was done by my thesis advisor in the 1960s.)

I don't think claiming that it doesn't work is a very logical position. See some of the lists of peer reviewed publications on the subject which have obviously been fairly widely replicated (see for example this link [fusor.net]. Clearly, the fact that these systems produce neutrons in substantial quantities seems unassailable - whether the exact results or numbers Hirsch and Meeks reported or claims (billions of neutrons per second or whatever) has been replicated doesn't affect the basic premise.

And of couse, patents be damned - trying to figure fuckall out from any patent is generally a futile exercise as anybody who's tried to do it will tell you.

Also, I remember the result you refer to from my Freshman year E&M class... that you can't produce a "particle trap" using an electric field alone. I remember similarly to you, that had to do with the fact that a potential well -> non-zero divergence and thus a source of charge... But I certainly don't remember in enough detail to imply that this device (whose existance is clearly admitted to by many real physicists) in any way contradicts Gauss' law. I sincerely doubt if you actually work through solving Poisson's equation in radial coordinates that you will find anything magically contradictory about the existence of this device, since nobody has gone around thumping their chests that Gauss was wrong because IEC is possible.

Now the question of whether these devices will lead to breakeven or better sustained fusion reactions - that's another question entirely, and I'll be damned if any of us know the answer to that one yet.

And I forgot to mention the European Aerospace Defense Corporation (formerly Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace) which sells these guys [eads.net]. Portable neutron generators using IEC. I doubt they just mistook the neutrons for background neutron flux...

LOL. Mix in some straw man with an ad hominem attack. Nice. Who the hell said a thing about it generating power? Can you fucking read my posts??? I merely pointed out that it is a commercial IEC device that generates neutrons from a fusion reaction. Duh.

I'm not sure you understand the meaning of "ad hominmen". The question was a legitmate one. The link you provided supported my argument that IEC is not a power supply as claimed by the slashdot summary.

In your original post, you quote a fusion rate, that while still miniscule, is a thousand times higher than what is actually claimed by your own link:

"Clearly, the fact that these systems produce neutrons in substantial quantities seems unassailable - whether the exact results or numbers Hirsch and Meeks reported or claims (billions of neutrons per second or whatever)"

It's not a legitimate question when it's phrased in that fashion and you know it. Don't be a fucking prick, it doesn't make you any friends. You copy the text from my post in yours and yet you still seem incapable of reading it. I can't help you with the English language. Billions of neutrons per second was the number claimed by Hirsch and Meeks according to fusor.net, and AS I SAID BEFORE IF YOU HAD READ MY POST the basic premise that fusion occurs and neutrons are produced has been replicated, though nobody seems to have achieved the exact numbers that H&M claimed. In other words, when you ask whether I have read my own links you make yourself look like an idiot since my links corroborated the contents of my post.

I spent about an hour reading through the whole fusor.net site, including many of the forum posts, prior to posting anything, though clearly you did not or you would realize that the operators of that site made no such claim that you are arguing against. The results of the U Wisconsin group are ~1E8 neutrons/sec and the portable commercial device I linked to here are ~1E7. Please don't be a fucknut and imply that somebody with half a brain can't properly compare orders of magnitude. So again, cut the fucking ad hominem attacks ("Do you read your own links?"). That is an offensive comment to make as it implies that I have somehow made some whopping error in logic or observation, which I have certainly not done. The only error of logic and observation being made here is by you, who seems to want to attribute to me your own misreading of a fucking moronic Slashdor editor/submitter, which I had fuck-all to do with.

If you look at the the general tenor of comments about the story and the submitter of the story, they are talking about a fusion power supply---not a low flux isotropic radiographic neutron source. My original comment was directed at them and I stand by it.

Your original reply to the my post was hostile, implied I didn't know my butt from a hole in the ground (that remains to be seen), that I was implicitly accusing researchers of scientific fraud. So, don't be too surprised when you get a curt response.

Hmmm... seem to hit a nerve with some people. I'm not too surprised. Before I reply specifically to your post, see my reply to the other poster. Once again, it would not rock my world if a _miniscule_ amount of fusion was going on in these devices.

Hmmm... no link to the results of the test. And this prize is in the engineering category. So, I don't consider this a proof-of-concept. A high school student building a high energy plasma source is a pretty big achievement in and of itself. What if the test was negative? It would still be worthy of the award.

From your wisc.edu link:

"The gridded IEC approach possesses the significant advantage that ions can be accelerated to high voltages (tens of keV) with relative ease."

Tens of keV isn't enough for a fusion reactor as a power supply. (Tens of keV is consistent with the Hirsch / Meeks patent.) And the goals of the project aren't a commercial reactor. Instead they looks like they are trying to produce a proton/neutron radiographic source (though the third goal of the project sounds like a round-a-bout way of saying "fusion power supply").

I don't deny the existence of the device. There is a guy in my research group at Los Alamos who had some grant money for investigating electrostatic fusion concepts. But, I don't think you'll see your home powered by it anytime soon for the reasons stated in my previous email. (Now, if you could get the confining potentials much much higher than shown in your wisc.edu page and in the Hirsh and Meeks patent, the idea is much more plausible.)

Eh? Re-read my post and you will see the last sentence makes the exact same statement you just made. Clearly none of these people have achieved or even come terribly close to breakeven energy production, and obviously the current forms of these devices aren't going to cut it. However, that's NOT what you said in your first post... you dismissed the concept out-of-hand as theoretically untenable and got yourself modded up to +5 despite the fact that quite a bit of evidence exists showing that lots of reasonable scientists have reproduced the basic results here. That's a straw man argument - you have proved a much weaker statement than you originally made, and in fact a point that everybody else agrees with you on already.

Oh, and yes, I realize the ISEF link doens't have any results, my point was that even a high school student actually DID build one of these things that the judges of this world-renowned contest, presumably scientists, were convinced did produce fusion. And my other links showed some other folks who had done the same in a legitimate research group at a well-respected university.

"All you need is some basic engineering skills, this site and the inspiration necessary to make your very own 'fusor' produce more energy than it consumes."

They are talking about a power supply. IEC is not one and to get to be one would require addressing the objections in my original post.

Also in my original post that I noted I've seen talks about the technology before at plasma physics conferences. So, once again, I don't doubt you can make such a device but I doubt that you can make one a power supply (as was stated by the story summary).

As far as proving a statement weaking than my original, I quote myself:

"To confine a plasma with sufficient energy to have respectable amounts of fusion..."

I didn't deny there was any fusion. Just not enough to get excited about as a power supply. Get the confining potential up to several MV and I'll start getting excited.

Nobody in their right mind is claiming that these things generate net power.

I agree that those words are somewhat misleading, but the whole fusor.net site clearly admits the current shortcomings of the technology. The Slashdot eds and submitters, as always, are irrelevant.

I don't care to argue further about what your original post said, but it was quite ambiguous. While you did say "respectable amounts of fusion" in one place, you then proceeded to give the appearance of making an argument that the whole concept was theoretically flawed when you said: "The potentials are a couple _thousand_ times too small to have any chance of confining fusion capable ions.". Also see your last paragraph in which you seem to claim that such a potential well could not exist. I merely tried to make a point that clearly fusion occurs in these devices. I find it annoying that you keep trying to attribute to me an argument that I never made. I'll stop claiming you said that IEC doesn't work if you stop claiming I said IEC will generate power, then we can get along and be friends and acknowledge that in the end we fully agree that this shit doesn't work now (for the purposes of power generation), might be feasible someday and thus is worthy of further investigation, but we aren't gonna see backpack sized fusion power generators anytime soon.

Okay. I stand by those statements though I should have elaborated on the Lawson criteria. It would have better exaplained about the "confining" issue. The fusing ions aren't trapped and since the plasma density is low, the vast majority fusion capable ions (which took much energy to make in the first place) zip right though the plasma without doing anything useful.

As far as "right minds" is concerned, there are people claiming IEC as a power supply that will be ready "real-soon-now" and these people do sometimes pop up at conferences or in the national media. It is unfortunate because they make legitimate research in the field more difficult.

The slashdot story summary was written just like that and gives this conspiratorial impression that fusion is easy but "The Man" is holding it down.

Controlled fusion power is tough and a long way off. The fusion research community shot itself in the foot long ago when they grossly underestimated how difficult it would be---leading to the recurrent quip that fusion is always just 20 years away. There have been several recent breakthroughs but history should teach people not to get their hopes up. IEC is a long shot for a power supply.

At no point in the patent was it explained (clearly... legalese is not good science writing) why high energy ions would be trapped and fuse in such a modest potential well.

I think you may have missed the key idea of the device, which is that the ions are indeed not trapped. Some of the ions which enter the reaction zone collide with other ions and react, but the ones which don't react proceed right on through. They are trapped in the device, (between the inner and outer grids) but not in the reaction zone. As you correctly state, there cannot be an electrostatic potential well inside the volume within the inner grid. Indeed, if the inner grid were perfect, there would be no electric field inside it at all.

If the fusing ions are not trapped, that is equivalent to a short-confinement time strategy. For that to work you need a high density plasma so the fusing ion has a respectable chance of actually fusing. This device lacks that. If you are doing low density, you want the ion trapped to that its chance of fusing is much higher (it stay in the plasma much longer).

Well... mistaking the natural background neutron flux for fusion has been a recurring theme in exotic fusion research. (A recent example is the controversy over claims by Oak Ridge scientists that miniscule amounts of fusion were being produced by sonoluminescene.)

I have no doubt that you can make a glowing ball of plasma with this technique. It wouldn't rock my world if there was an infinitesimal amount of fusion going on. But, I don't see any reason to believe this will be the next generation power source or could be developed into one.

This isn't an out of hand dismissal of the exotic techniques; I'm much more open to wacky ideas than many of my colleagues. And I don't have a whole lot of faith in mainstream techniques for fusion becoming viable power sources either (but that is another issue).

However, the mainstream techniques have calculated the requirements needed to make a viable fusion reactor. It is neatly summarized by the Lawson criteria. By looking at Lawson criteria, you can develop different strategies for designing a fusion reactor. The strategies amount to trade offs between plasma density, plasma temperature or duration of confinement. Laser and heavy-ion inertial confinement aim for high-density but short confinement time. Magnetic confinement uses a long confinement time but a low density. And so forth...

I don't see anything here to indicate this is competitive with mainstreams techniques (which are themselves already lacking) and there are obvious problems with the physics in making the reactor more practical.

The site recommends an article from tom ligon on Analog magazine, which talks about "the simplest fusion reactor".Since all you slashdot readers are kinda lazy here is the google cache for the article:link [google.com] Its pretty nice, since the tripod page linked on the site is not/.ed but over free bandwidth.

Farnsworth did indeed have the first all-electronic TV system. Zworklin was working at the same time, but got his system up later. Both had miserably insensitive camera tubes, but for quite different reasons.

The Farnsworth Image Dissector sensed the whole image at once, turning it into a collimated beam of electrons. But then it deflected the collimated beam over a scanning aperture, only using a tiny portion of the beam at a time. This approach is very insensitive. The incoming light energy is divided by the number of pixels. Image dissectors thus only work with brighly lit scenes.
Very brightly lit scenes. Even with a big lens, you needed bright sunlight. Early versions were hopeless, but by adding some photomultiplier stages, Farnsworth managed to increase the sensitivity a bit. But it was still lousy.
Image dissectors are still used today for looking into furnaces, but not for much else.

Zworklin's Iconoscope, on the other hand, accumulated light over a whole frame time, and scanned it off a photosensitive plate with a scanning electron beam. Iconoscopes didn't have a photomultiplier stage, and they, too, produced a weak signal.

After much litigation, licensing, and years of work, RCA Labs finally produced the image orthicon [netins.net], a complex and expensive tube that combined the photosensitive plate of the iconoscope with the photomultiplier stages of the image dissector. This, at last, produced a usable TV camera tube.

basicly what is created is the center of a star or planet. The physical spheres are used to focus energies which create the necessary field structures to contain one another and they then force further contraction until their own "gravity" causes them to fuse.

I do belive the latest theory of why the earth gives off heat is due to a sustained fusion reaction in the center of the planet. Could this be just the proof of such a posibility?

Matter-antimatter reactions produce gamma rays and other high-energy radiation. In order to harness this energy, you need to convert it into electricity, which requires actually absorbing the radiation. But since gamma rays laugh at lead or gold shielding and blast right through, there's a wee problem.

In contrast, the device mentioned in the article produces alpha particles (when configured appropriately, using Boron fuel). Alpha particles, if they touch metals, suck off 2 electrons to become helium atoms. This produces a net charge, and voila - electricity. The use of alpha particles in this way (such as from radioactive decay of certain isotopes) is well-tested. Since the majority (perhaps 95%) of the energy produced would be in the form of alpha particles, this type of reactor has the potential to be extremely efficient.

Regrettably, I don't have the background to determine whether it's all a crock or not. It sounds plausible, but all the best ones do. I'll believe it when it's powering my computer, but I'd donate a dollar to see if it could be done.

Unfortunately, the majority of the energy created in the system (which I think could plausibly break even or even function as a reactor, but if it were constructed to the highest precision, perfect sphericity, which we can not really obtain) is not in what particle is created, but the speed that particle is given due to the reaction. That's right, most of the energy from mass-energy conservation equation (E=M*C^2) is in the kinetic energy of the particles which have reacted. So using their electrical properties to evolve electrical energy is ignoring the vast majority of the energy.Most generators (as far as I know) would convert this kinetic energy into thermal energy by using the velocity of the particles to heat some sort of water resorvoir, which would generate steam and drive a turbine like any old coal generator, except without the fire and coal and soot and yuck.

Yeh. Too bad that the energy required to make a gram of anti-matter costs $20 trillion USD, takes 300 years to produce, and could provide enough electricity to light NYC for about 10 minutes.

AM/M reactors are prized for their energy density, not energy economy. Not to mention, that unless someone comes up with some sort of anti-matter breeder reactor, we'll never be able to make enough fuel to do more than experiment.

Now, being God, whenever I want anti-matter, I just re-adjust supersymetry temporarily, but lame fuckwads like you have to get your own. Nyah nyah nyah nyah!

In 30 years world electricity requirements
will be ~3,500,000 MW (nameplate). Wind is now increasing at the rate of
~4,700 MW per year (nameplate). The average increase per year for the last
decade has been ~25%, and that rate is increasing. It will reach ~3.5
million MW in ~30 years. There are more than enough wind resources in North
America, China, and Europe to power the entire world. Offshore wind
resources in the North Sea could produce four times more energy than Europe
consumes. Wind-poor locations and peak-demand generators can be served with
wind-generated hydrogen fuel. The cost of wind generators is falling
rapidly. Taking into account the hidden costs of fossil fuel, such as
pollution and war, wind is already cheaper than any other source. There are
no technical limitations that would prevent wind from meeting all demand for
electricity.

there are some social limitations. Namely the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) crowd.

Perhaps you are familiar with the Altamont Pass wind generators, which are quite noisy. Modern wind turbines are quiet (but not so quiet that birds can't hear them) and are generally not resisted by NIMBY-types, even in comparison to ordinary electrical wires. They coexist well with ordinary farmland, and probide the farmers with an extra source of income; in many cases exceeding that of their income from the crops and/or livestock on the same land. Free money makes the backyard wind turbine much more attractive.

And the Environazis have discovered that wind generators have been killing hand raised California Condors along with raptors

This is a myth. Birds have been naturally selected for hundreds of millions of years for their ability to avoid objects while flying. The many wind turbines already in California pose no significant risk to condors or any other endangered species. They do kill a few raptors now an then, but not even 1% of enough to impact their population.